Press Release Body = A Chicago man, a painting contractor, retired and moved toFlorida. Not long thereafter the IRS came down on him for unpaid taxes and a largelending institution threatened to sue him over missed loan payments. After drawing acredit report on himself, out of bewilderment, he discovered a multiple of unknowncharges. His only crime? Some 50 years before, the man, now 70, applied for andreceived a social security card. \"I don\'t understand it,\" he frets. \"I\'ve alwayslived a responsible life. I paid my bills. I never carried a credit card balance. Inever cheated on my taxes. Now all this. It\'s a nightmare.\"

Last year some 9,000,000 people paid taxes that did not match social securityrecords. What\'s the core of the problem? Illegal immigrants. Up to 80% of thesenon-matched records are believed to originate with these people who file stolen orpurely manufactured numbers. Follow-up investigations have revealed as many as 35employers having the same SS number under different names. And, incredibly, nomechanism for notifying the rightful number holder exists.

Jack Payne, the founder and first publisher of Business Opportunities Digest, hasstrong feelings on the subject. \"It\'s \'legal\' crime being perpetrated on all of usby our own government,\" he theorizes. \"What else can you call it? The truevictims--the legitimate card holders--never know until IRS comes after them for backtaxes, and when private companies try to collect unpaid loans and overdue bills. With no legal requirement to report irregularities, the people who know don\'t. Instead they simply put their heads in the sand, plead nolo contendre, and hidebehind the Privacy Law.

There is absolutely no incentive to level with you about all the imposters riding onyour social security number. Contrarily, important non-incentives to inform exist.because benefits abound. The Social Security Administration collects huge sums ofextra taxes which they dump into something called their Earnings Surplus File, anaccounting limbo that now houses $420 billion. Creditors sell more loans, andmerchants sell more goods on credit. Employers get cheap labor. Thus, everybody is awinner through this non-system system. Everybody, that is, except you, the rightfulcard holder. This is why this failure to protect you from such obvious, outrighttheft, adds up to \'legal\' crime to me. It\'s the politicians in Washington whocreated this farce of a financial state, and who are responsible for it.